So Justin Bieber Presented the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature

…And I didn’t even know until this morning when I opened the web browser. I suppose it speaks to how little I really care about awards season in general, which almost always snubs my favourite films of the year. However, last night at the Golden Globes, it was Justin Bieber who announced the award for Best Animated Feature (won by the the bookies favourite of course), with a girl whom I can only suppose was chosen because the two of them would look cute together or some nonsense like that.

I could rant on about how Bieber isn’t even worthy of announcing an award, heck, he’s somehow worthy of an auto-biography despite not even being halfway through his teenage years! But rather the focus of my attention is why in the wide, wide world of sports did the ceremony’s producers feel they needed to use someone under the age of 20 to announce the best animated feature award?

Having a kid (and according to my Dad, you’re not really an adult until you can grow a moustache) present the animated award says more to the public at large about animation than anything else the industry can seem to do to prove otherwise. This is despite the inclusion of The Illusionist, which sits firmly outside the mainstream Hollywood offerings.

It’s somewhat disheartening, I mean, it’s Justin Bieber, the kid who got famous from YouTube and whose record company is undoubtedly ripping him off as we speak, and why the Golden Globes?! The Nickelodeon Kid Choice Awards seem more appropriate, and even then they haul out a few big-time celebrities to present an award and get slimed.

If anything, the decision to use him smacks of laziness on the part of the producers, who obviously were looking for a kid-friendly host for a supposedly kid-friendly category. It once again brings to the fore the argument that animation is a genre rather than an artform and castigates animators and fans alike for even liking an animated film.

Thankfully though, animated films tend to speak in cash rather than gold, so while the artform may be continuing to struggle for recognition from adults, it can confidently say that on average, the films are far more profitable.

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I’ve been feeling torn over the whole idea of “Beast Animated Feature” awards lately. On the one hand, I feel like they contribute to the idea that animation is not to be considered in the same league as live-action films. Even when animated films do get nominated for major awards like Best Picture (something that I suspect we will see happening more and more at the Oscars at least, now that they’ve increased the number of possible nominees), I worry that voters will feel encouraged to hand the animated film the “consolation prize” of Best Animated Feature instead of voting for it as Best Picture of the year.

But on the other hand, I realize that having a separate Animated Feature category gives some of the nominees recognition and publicity they would not otherwise enjoy. I don’t know if “The Secret of Kells” would have received the wider U.S. release that allowed me to see it had it not been nominated for an Oscar. If more people hear about movies like “The Secret of Kells,” “Triplets of Bellville,” and “The Illusionist” because they get nominated for a big movie award and maybe a few of them actually see those movies, isn’t that a good thing in the end?

It is a kind of catch-22 situation where one the one side, we’d like to see animated films get the same recognition as live-action ones and on the other, if we did, we would risk losing the publicity associated for the animated categories.

I think there is a happy medium in there somewhere. There is no reason after all, why films cannot be nominated in both categories, like Up was last year. I suppose ideally, the best solution would be to widen the short-list to maybe 7-8 films and stipulate that at least one if not two be animated. While that would undoubtedly exclude the family favourites, it might lead to a greater acceptance of animated films as real films.

It’s a tough call, but I’d be happy if the Academy accepted just one animated film per year into the Best Feature category. There is always one that is capable of going up against the live-action films (although I don’t think Toy Story 3 is the one to do it this year) and it would at least offer the possibility of having a halo effect on the other animated films.